Publications by Franziska Gerber

Influence of air flow features on alpine wind energy potential

Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Franziska Gerber, Jérôme François Sylvain Dujardin, Fanny Kristianti

Wind energy is one of the potential options to fill the gap in renewable energy production in Switzerland during the winter season when the energy demand exceeds local production capacities. With likely further rising energy consumption in the future, the ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

Introducing CRYOWRF v1.0: multiscale atmospheric flow simulations with advanced snow cover modelling

Michael Lehning, Varun Sharma, Franziska Gerber

Accurately simulating snow-cover dynamics and the snow-atmosphere coupling is of major importance for topics as wide-ranging as water resources, natural hazards and climate change impacts with consequences for sea-level rise. We present a new modelling fra ...

2023

The High-resolution Intermediate Complexity Atmospheric Research (HICAR v1.1) model enables fast dynamic downscaling to the hectometer scale

Franziska Gerber, Dylan Stewart Reynolds

High-resolution ( < 1 km) atmospheric modeling is increasingly used to study precipitation distributions in complex terrain and cryosphere-atmospheric processes. While this approach has yielded insightful results, studies over annual timescales or at the s ...

Copernicus Gesellschaft Mbh2023

Combining Weather Station Data and Short-Term LiDAR Deployment to Estimate Wind Energy Potential with Machine Learning: A Case Study from the Swiss Alps

Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Franziska Gerber, Jérôme François Sylvain Dujardin, Fanny Kristianti

Wind energy potential in complex terrain is still poorly understood and difficult to quantify. With Switzerland’s current efforts to shift to renewable energy resources, it is now becoming even more crucial to investigate the hidden potential of wind energ ...

2023

Reproducibility Dataset for CRYOWRF v1.0

Michael Lehning, Varun Sharma, Franziska Gerber

This repository contains data required for reproducibility of the results to be published in the associated manuscript. Apart from reproducibility, the attached datasets also serve as templates for new users to adopt CRYOWRF in their research. The datasets ...

2023

CRYOWRF—Model Evaluation and the Effect of Blowing Snow on the Antarctic Surface Mass Balance

Michael Lehning, Varun Sharma, Franziska Gerber

The surface mass balance (SMB) of large polar ice sheets and of snow and ice surfaces in general are incompletely understood because of the complexity of processes involved. One such process, drifting and blowing snow, has only been considered in a very si ...

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION2023

Preprocessing Antarctic Weather Station (AWS) data in python

Michael Lehning, Franziska Gerber

There are many sources providing atmospheric weather station data for the Antarctic continent. However, variable naming, timestamps and data types are highly variable between the different sources. The published python code intends to make processing of di ...

Zenodo2022

A Downscaling Intercomparison Study: The Representation of Slope- and Ridge-Scale Processes in Models of Different Complexity

Varun Sharma, Franziska Gerber, Albertus Christiaan Kruyt, Dylan Stewart Reynolds

Spatially distributed meteorological information at the slope scale is relevant for many processes in complex terrain, yet information at this sub-km spatial resolution is difficult to obtain. While downscaling to kilometer resolutions is well described in ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Reproducibility dataset for CRYOWRF validation

Michael Lehning, Varun Sharma, Franziska Gerber

This dataset contains data and scripts for "CRYOWRF - a validation and the effect of blowing snow on the Antarctic SMB" (Gerber et al., 2022).* Simulation_setup: Namelists and input information to run the simulation. Some input files need to be downloaded ...

Zenodo2022

High resolution static data for WRF over Switzerland

Michael Lehning, Franziska Gerber

Static input data (topography, landuse and soiltype) for the WRF preprocessing system WPS is provided for Switzerland and its neighboring countries between 45-49 N and 4-12 E. The data is provided at a resolution of 1 s. Topography is based on the Aster da ...

2021

Challenging and Improving the Simulation of Mid-Level Mixed-Phase Clouds Over the High-Latitude Southern Ocean

Alexis Berne, Franziska Gerber, Etienne Gabriel Henri Vignon, Athanasios Nenes, Georgia Sotiropoulou

Climate models exhibit major radiative biases over the Southern Ocean owing to a poor representation of mixed-phase clouds. This study uses the remote-sensing dataset from the Measurements of Aerosols, Radiation and Clouds over the Southern Ocean (MARCUS) ...

2021

REMA topography and AntarcticaLC2000 for WRF

Michael Lehning, Franziska Gerber

Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (REMA) topography and AntarcticaLC2000 landuse dataare now available as static data input for the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF). Topographyand landuse are made available at a spatial resolution of 1 km ...

2020

Measured ice nucleating particle concentrations improve the simulation of mid-level mixed-phase clouds over the high-latitude Southern Ocean

Alexis Berne, Franziska Gerber, Etienne Gabriel Henri Vignon, Athanasios Nenes, Georgia Sotiropoulou

2020

The Importance of Near-Surface Winter Precipitation Processes in Complex Alpine Terrain

Michael Lehning, Franziska Gerber

In this study, near-surface snow and graupel dynamics from formation to deposition are analyzed using WRF in a large-eddy configuration. The results reveal that a horizontal grid spacing of ≤50 m is required to resolve local orographic precipitation enhanc ...

2019

From the clouds to the ground - Effects of flow-precipitation interactions on snow distribution in complex alpine terrain

Franziska Gerber

Knowledge about the spatial distribution of seasonal snow is essential e.g. to efficiently manage fresh water resources or for hydro-power companies. The large-scale gradient of snow accumulation over mountain ranges is mainly determined by lifting condens ...

EPFL2018

Spatial variability in snow precipitation and accumulation in COSMO–WRF simulations and radar estimations over complex terrain

Michael Lehning, Alexis Berne, Varun Sharma, Franziska Gerber, Nikola Besic, Marco Gabella, Urs Martin Germann

Snow distribution in complex alpine terrain and its evolution in the future climate is important in a variety of applications including hydropower, avalanche forecasting and freshwater resources. However, it is still challenging to quantitatively forecast ...

2018

A close-ridge small-scale atmospheric flow field and its influence on snow accumulation

Michael Lehning, Franziska Gerber, Sebastian Wilhelm Hoch

The rough, steep, and complex terrain in the alpine environment causes a variety of flow patterns such as blocking, speed-up, or flow separation, which influence precipitation, snow deposition, and ultimately snow distribution on the ground. Cloud-terrain ...

Amer Geophysical Union2017